Network services are widely deployed and useful in many networks. The services (service-functions) provide a range of functions such as security, wide area network (WAN) acceleration, firewall, Network Address Translation (NAT), deep packet inspection (DPI), intrusion detection service (IDS), server load balancing, etc. Service-functions may be physically located at different points in the network infrastructure, such as the WAN, data center, campus, and so forth.
In certain circumstances, service-functions may be applied as part of a “service chain.” A service chain is a data structure defining a set of service nodes hosting various service-functions and the order in which the service-functions should be applied to the data/payload (e.g., video data, numeric data, alphanumeric data, voice data, etc.) of selective traffic (packets/frames).